Item: Khoros Communities
Rating: 9
Author: Brian Oblinger

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Khoros Communities at two organizations to build vibrant communities of customers, partners, and employees to drive to increase engagement, satisfaction, retention, and a host of other imperatives across the business. The primary use case in both instances was scalable support via case deflection and cost reduction. We then leveraged it across a number of other use cases including learning, innovation, ideation, internal collaboration, and corporate communications.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Robust - The feature/functionality set is best-in-class.
Scalable - The platform can handle any volume/size community you can throw at it.
Extensible - APIs and customization frameworks enable great flexibility.

Cons

Workflow capabilities for things like Knowledge Base and Blogs are lacking (updates have been promised for 2020).
Minor features that are present in other solutions are missing (although the roadmap pace of releases is picking up).

Return on Investment

Reduced overall support costs.
Accelerated and expanded purchasing decisions.
Increased efficiency of knowledge sharing and learning delivery.
Expanded ability to gather customer feedback and turn into actionable insights.

Scalability

I am not aware of another active enterprise community platform that can achieve the scale that Khoros offers at this point.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are serious about owned and branded community as a core pillar of your business, Khoros is best-in-class across a number of key areas. It is no surprise that many of the largest brands in the world utilize Khoros Communities due to their ability to deliver a quality experience at scale. Khoros' flexibility to customize and ability to integrate with many different business systems gives it an advantage over competitors.

Those that fail with Khoros often do so at the hands of their own community strategy (or lack thereof), not because of technical roadblocks or lack of execution of Khoros' part. This is true of nearly all community platform vendors.

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